Other Latin American projects

The Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC) at the University of Texas at Austin is the most comprehensive resource for information on Latin America (http://lanic.utexas.edu/). The project regularly attracts funding for more and more additions. The most recent is the Association of Research Libraries’ Latin Americanist Research Resources Project which aims to expand the project beyond the original focus on Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico into the Andean countries, Central America, and the Caribbean and to augment the project’s retrospective coverage. The cooperatively managed project was originally established with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and matched by one-time contributions from each of over 40 participating libraries. It offers digital access to government publications and user-initiated document delivery requests for articles via a table-of-contents database. LAPTOC, the project that provides the table-of-contents database, contains (as of October 2000):

Eudora Loh (2000), Chair of the Project Advisory Committee, reports that this represents a growth of 54% in the number of tables of contents added to the database over the last two years.  The Latin American partners, the Biblioteca Inca and CIRMA, are contributing 18% of all the titles in the database (77 Andean titles, 29 Central American), and they expect this number to grow in the coming years.

The Latin American and Caribbean Government Documents Project at Cornell University, organizes and describes the many Latin American and Caribbean official documents appearing on the Internet. The project at http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/ladocshome1.html consists of a series of tables that groups similar kinds of information, briefly summarizes their contents and provides links to the appropriate level of the source server. An important part of the service logs lost pages to a subsidiary table labeled “Inactive” located beneath each of the five document categories, thus a continuous “history” develops. Government sites are determined to be URLs dedicated solely to the display of information produced by an official state, department or agency. Such government sites may appear as ministries, secretaries, bureaus and under several Internet domains such as gov, org, edu and dot com. They all focus on information produced by Latin American government agencies. One of the most useful services is the Latin American Statistical Sources from various National Statistical Bureaus at http://lib1.library.cornell.edu/colldev/lastatistics.html.

One of the most comprehensive sources for information of all kinds on Latin America is the Internet Resources for Latin America site at New Mexico State University compiled by Molly Molloy (1998) of the NMSU Library, see http://lib.nmsu.edu/subject/bord/laguia. The links in this guide provide access to many information resources for Latin American studies. Included are some of the best places to find unique and useful information, including academic, government and non-governmental organizations that provide information via the web. The site also points to Latin American directories, subscription databases, public domain databases, library catalogs, organizations, regional and national news, and list of Internet Lists & Newsgroups.